Ask HN: What do you do with a finished product? - <AUTHOR>

I'm ready to start getting some users on my site (http://debate-zone.com), but I'm unsure of how to do it. Buy ads? SEO stuff? Spam? Thanks if have advice! <comment><USER2> How you get users depends on what your goal is. It looks like your site offers a free service and has advertising (AdWords and selling ads directly [hint: telling users to name a price is not a good idea.]) as it's only income source. This pretty much rules out paying for users unless it can be done very cheaply as you aren't going to make much per new user.

SEO is good. A properly configured site can work wonders, but beyond that, a good product will "SEO itself". Spending time on linkbuilding campaigns or blackhat SEO will not be efficient in the long run.

Buying ads could be expensive and wouldn't be worth it to me. That would depend on where you can advertise and the cost, but I wouldn't do it.

Spam is an obvious no.

So what can you do? Well, this post right here will more then likely get some visitors to check out your site (if that was your intent, +1 sneaky). I'd focus on creating the best product you can, including a better design, alternative monetization methods, and asking HN or current users for suggestions on improvement and implementing them. [sidenote: I don't have many projects I consider finished, only paused if I'm not working on them. Stay open to future development. If you aren't adapting and improving, you're falling behind.]

You could contribute to debate forums or other relevant websites, posting genuinely helpful comments relevant to your site and harmlessly introducing it. I personally like to only use advertising methods that I would not be annoyed with, but if your only goal is to make money, just spam your site all over the place. You might make a little cash, but you'll get a bad reputation doing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback. I'm looking mostly to have an active community, but one that generates some small revenue on the side. I'm just looking to pay back hosting etc. costs. I agree with the idea that a project should never be finished, and that's what I used to think, but then I read a few hacker news articles about fail early etc., and I realized I was spending way too much time on little features. I went through a bunch of layout changes, and while this one is boring, I think it works.

I just added anonymous arguing, so that will help the site get some activity, I think. I don't want to do blackhat stuff/actively SEO it, but only if nothing else works.

I bought a Reddit self-serve ad, and I guess I'll see how that works, and I'll start making small comments on political forums or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bug Report: At 7pm Austin time (April 10th, 2010), I cannot load your site in IE 7.0.5730.11 on Win XP Pro SP2.

Before the site fully loads it freezes the browser then leaves an empty (blank) broswer outline.

I tried twice and it happened both times. I had to use the task manager to kill the browser both times.

IE 7 is still in service for many users, thats why I used it to look at your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, thanks for telling me. It seems I forgot to test the site in any IE - in IE8 it's completely messed up, and I can only assume it's worse in IE7. I'll try to fix it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Create a feature matrix of your site versus other debate sites. Show why yours is better. Do a screencast and show how easy it is to use.

Have you seen <http://www.whitehouse2.org/> or <http://www.allrise.com/> \-- at least there is a focus. Yours has none.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good ideas, thanks. I haven't seen whitehouse2, which is really good, or allrise. Mine doesn't have a focus, it's basically a site where you can debate about anything, and tag it so it stays a bit organized. Or do you mean something else by focus? I'll add a quick feature matrix now.

<comment><USER4> I meant a theme. With a matrix, you can use what you find on other sites to guide the development of your own.

<comment><AUTHOR> A visual theme, or a content theme?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> gold mines:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1247292>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267639>

<comment><AUTHOR> These are amazing, thanks.</comment></comment>


Nutiteq offline maps SDK for iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> http://developer.nutiteq.com

<comment><USER2> Seems like no attribution is given to OpenStreetMap? That's not nice.

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3a._I_would_lik...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3a._I_would_like_to_use_OpenStreetMap_maps._How_should_I_credit_you.3F)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the start pages states "Vector maps from OpenStreetMap" 3 times. Technically it is up to app developer to add proper attribution, as our SDK can be used with other sources also. OSM is provided just for convenience. But point taken, I'll add reminder about attribution requirements to the developer guides also.

<comment><USER2> The developer portal at [https://developer.nutiteq.com](https://developer.nutiteq.com) mentions OpenStreetMap, but the start and product pages doesn't. No link either. Perhaps you provide more sources, I haven't looked into the product very carefully. Your support told me OSM is used as map data source, didn't mention any other source. My understanding of the OSM license agreement is that you have to make it more explicit. But I'm no lawyer.

"Our requested attribution is "© OpenStreetMap contributors". You must also make it clear that the data is available under the Open Database Licence. This can be achieved by providing a "License" or "Terms" link which links to www.openstreetmap.org/copyright or www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl."

Regardless whether required or not I think it'd be cool of you to mention it more explicitly since you're creating a business around it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I'm daily OpenStreetMapper myself. The other map options can be added in project basis, as the geodata from any other sources tends to be extremely expensive for average end-user app developers. Of course it has to be attributed properly in each app.

<comment><USER3> Still, you should mention it (prominently, hopefully) on your homepage.

I don't think it'd hurt your business, quite the opposite. For some people, knowing it's OSM-based may be a feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would be interesting to see this available for the web platform as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been asked quite a lot, but HTML5/WebGL approach would require another complete rewrite. One of our key advantages: showing maps without network would not really work there, but this could be resolved with a storage-enabled wrapper like Cordova. We have even thought about making native plugin for Cordova, then existing code (with fast performance etc) would work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How old IOS and Android versions are supported?

<comment><AUTHOR> Android since API 9 (2.3) and iOS 7. Would you need more? iOS 6 can be added quite easily.

<comment><USER6> Great job on the 2.3, I know the android community turns their nose up that 5% or so (last time i checked)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is this better than Google maps, which is also available on both platforms?

<comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: is for more demanding app requirements. For end-user apps: offline maps support. Google Maps has it as app (and not everywhere), we provide SDK where it works globally. For more demanding needs you can add 3D objects to map, use it for HUD navigation (Google terms prohibit it), use completely own/custom base map etc. See [https://www.nutiteq.com/nutiteq- sdk/comparison/](https://www.nutiteq.com/nutiteq-sdk/comparison/) for more more differences and similarities

<comment><USER7> Great thanks. You may want to include a diff of the gmaps features on the site, for clairity</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: iOS Storyboards considered harmful? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, I'm just getting started in iOS development with Swift, and I've found Storyboards to be pretty helpful so far.  Editing code in Xcode feels really clumsy, however, and I'd much prefer to develop in Sublime.  My only reservation with that is that I'd be forced to either A) use 2 editors, or B) forgo Storyboards.
I've found a lot of commentary online supporting option B, railing against Storyboards/Interface Builder, extolling the benefits of code-based UIs. This approach has the potential to appeal to me, since it's exactly how I feel about developing interfaces for the web.
So, are storyboards bad?  Should I just learn to design my apps through code?  Is there anything besides the visual feedback of storyboards that I'd be giving up by switching to a pure-code workflow? <comment><USER2> Storyboards are a pain if you are working with multiple people on the same codebase. That's where I avoid them. Otherwise they'r okay & my impression at WWDC was that Apple strongly recommends the use of Storyboards, probably mostly because more screen sizes are coming & that's their preferred way of dealing with this.</comment>


On Preventing Programming Languages from Interfering with Programming (1975) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://breckyunits.com/files/mckeeman1975.pdf <comment><USER2> Today we seem to need "on preventing frameworks from interfering with Programming"

<comment><USER3> All we'll ever need is "on preventing programmers from interfering with programming."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode](https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode)

No interference whatsoever

</comment><comment><USER5> First we assume that our program needs to solve a well defined mathematical problem. Then we realise that that has nothing to do with any relevant programming problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> This sounds similar to the process used for some parts of Cardano. Duncan Coutts talked about this in this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZGVgNsJSnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZGVgNsJSnA)

</comment><comment><USER7> What you program it's top down. So every level of the stack effects everything below. Interestingly things below can also hotpatch things above as needed by developers. Simply ship the patch upstream or monkey patch it yourself and publish the github repo with your patch.</comment>


Content Marketing Strategy – Let Customers Find You - <AUTHOR> http://www.contentmarketingwriter.com/content-marketing-strategy-let-customers-find-you/

<comment><USER2> Is unlawfully using copyrighted photography part of that strategy?</comment>


Bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD - <AUTHOR> https://adrianchadd.blogspot.com/2017/04/bringing-up-80211ac-on-freebsd.html <comment><USER2> How does...one reach this level of understanding in systems programming? My coursework in this area was very general at best. Are there any courses out there that focus on this theory-meets-real-world level that you folks would recommend? Would prefer one in Linux, but I'm not that picky.

Or does one just happen into these jobs as an apprentice and spend years learning on the job?

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's learning on the job.

In the specific case of 802.11 (different from 'Wi-Fi' which is a marketing term from the Wi-Fi consortium), you'll also need to be familiar with the IEEE 802.11 specifications. You can do this by putting aside a block of time to read parts of the actual specs [1], supplemented by the O'Reilly 802.11 books by Matthew Gast [2] which I found to be really helpful during my time working with various 802.11 modules.

[1] [ [http://standards.ieee.org/about/get/802/802.11.html](http://standards.ieee.org/about/get/802/802.11.html) ]

[2] [ [http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/692](http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/692) ]

<comment><USER4> wow specs that are free.. in the wireless world a lot of specs are free, as I just googled. however later that day I worked with NXP NTAG's 213-216 and tried to figure out more specifications especially about NDEF and they were put behind big paywalls. very very sad ([http://nfc-forum.org/our- work/specifications-and-application...](http://nfc-forum.org/our- work/specifications-and-application-documents/specifications/nfc-forum- technical-specifications/)) I always wonder how to push such technologies, if you can't implement it without paying. it's just akward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Adrian Chadd is FreeBSD's Wireless One-Man-Army. Awesome stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> > If I chose, say, the Intel 11ac parts then I'd have to implement a lot more > of the fiddly stuff to get good behaviour

Okay, I'll have to wait another year to get 11ac on my laptop :) It's not, like, super critical to me, 11a is enough for most daily tasks and for e.g. system upgrades I just connect to Ethernet (BTW it's super easy to set up seamless handover between Wi-Fi and Ethernet on FreeBSD, using link aggregation)

Nice work, Adrian!

</comment><comment><USER7> "When men were men, and wrote their own device drivers..." — Linus Torvalds

</comment><comment><USER8> Hah. It wasn't so long ago that I heard Adrian swearing he would _NOT_ be writing an Atheros driver.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hats off to people who are skilled enough, and have the will, to implement these things in open source.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sweet! This is a badly needed feature</comment>


Protean Echo: Fuse all your cards into one for $80 - <AUTHOR> http://www.getprotean.com/

<comment><USER2> <http://www.getprotean.com/images/infographic3.jpg>

This is blatantly misleading. Protean users carry 1 card AND AN IPHONE. The card only stores 3 at a time. :/

<comment><USER3> Echo may be used with or without a phone. When you are without your phone, you can use any one of the three cards already loaded on Echo. When you have your phone (iPhone or Android) with you, you can set Echo to mimic any mag-stripe card in your wallet with a couple taps of your phone.

<comment><USER2> That graphic implies that the Echo replaces 6, 10 or an infinite number of cards, but does not make clear that it is only three at a time and that the rest are loaded onto the phone. When you say "Echo users carry 1 card" in comparison to the first two examples, you are implying a parity for which I can compare the three: I am likely the average American with 6 cards or even possibly in the 13% that have 10+ credit cards. For both of those groups the card would need to be used in conjunction with a phone in order to get the same benefits as 6 or 10+ cards, but that is not illustrated in anyway. This is misleading.

<comment><USER4> Wdewind, I'm sorry you found the website misleading. Our research indicates that a large majority of smartphone users carry their phone with them when they are shopping (and virtually everywhere else they go outside the home). For these users, Echo can replace all the rest of their payment cards.

We hoped that between the FAQ section and the How section, the fact that Echo can only hold three cards at a time was made clearly enough. Perhaps it was not.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll consider ways of clarifying this point on our website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The anti-fraud aspects of a card are usually checked as well by cashiers at least. I'm not sure this would be accepted.

<comment><USER3> We are confident most merchants will accept Echo at the POS. Echo will be laser engraved with the cardholder's name, will display a CVV code in E-Ink, and will be signed just like any other card. Today, merchants are increasingly used to seeing unusual looking cards, such as the Chase Sapphire (<https://creditcards.chase.com/credit-cards/chase-sapphire.as...>) and Amex's titanium Centurion card.

<comment><USER5> Interesting. It looks like a useful product for sure...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is that phrase about putting all your egg's into one basket again!

If I wanted to combine all my credit cards into one easy nickable device I'd do it with a NFC mobile phone.

<comment><USER7> At least my NFC mobile phone has remote wipe.

<comment><USER6> Exactly and easier to report stolen as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi guys,

As Co-founder and COO at Protean, I wanted to thank each of you for sharing your thoughts on Echo. I tried to clarify some things in my responses to several of your comments. Feel free to contact me any time at firstname.lastname@example.com with additional questions, comments or concerns regarding Echo.

Thanks again for your interest in Echo!

</comment><comment> Pirate-of-SV Cool, but the solution to this problem is not another card.

<comment><USER3> We're very excited about NFC and mobile payment. We feel, however, that mobile payment is not yet ready for prime time. A small fraction of current smart phones are NFC enabled, and an even smaller fraction of merchants and retailers have upgraded to terminals capable of accepting NFC payment. Echo is compatible with existing swipe terminals and therefor enables Americans to begin taking advantage mobile payment/wallet technologies today!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks like a good solution if you have limited wallet space like in the twelve-south book book case for iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice, icache.com 's solution is bulkier and pricier.</comment>


MoMo: Ensuring Reliable Access To Water With Open Source Hardware - <AUTHOR> http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2013/12/momo-%252D-ensuring-reliable-access-to-water-in-the-developing-world

<comment><USER2> This is a great example of using our talents for the greater good of society. Would love to work on something like this rather than yet another enterprise CRUD app for people who don't like Excel.</comment>


San Francisco's scooter war: city hits back as 'unlawful' schemes flood streets - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/17/san-francisco-electric-scooter-schemes-backlash-cease-desist <comment><AUTHOR> They look rather fun. I'm sure there are other annoyances the city could regulate.</comment>


Why Zipcar's Founder Didn't Get Rich in the Deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/100349819

<comment><USER2> She stepped down in 2003. It could be argued that she really didn't build the company that was sold for $500MM.</comment>


Is Noise Pollution the Next Big Public-Health Crisis? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/13/is-noise-pollution-the-next-big-public-health-crisis <comment><USER2> I wish California would implement something like a revenue neutral cost shift on registration. Louder vehicle pay more (progressively with how loud they are, quieter ones pay less-- adjusted to be a net increase in cost over the median and a net decrease under it. (With louder defined using their noise at 0-25MH speeds)

I'd certainly feel better about the irritating motorcycles if they were subsidizing all the quiet EVs. The bikers say the ear splitting noise is useful to improve safety? Okay, they can pay for it.

Like other forms of pollution we don't need to immediately stop all of it to make an improvement.

Now lets talk about dark skies...

<comment><USER3> Yes because it is appropriate to have to pay more to have a safe mode of 'green' transit. Loud motorcycles are annoying; when they have a fatality rate per mile closer to cars you be can complain on that basis.

<comment><USER2> The riders intentionally choose a less safe form of transit and gain many benefits from doing so, including lower fuel and maintenance cost. Good for them, but their noise is an externality: I shouldn't get less enjoyment from my home because someone decided to use a less safe but more cost efficient mode of transportation.

The loud noise also presumably causes something of an arms race with more acoustically insulated, less fuel efficient, cars.

The eventual alternative is outright banning the noise. I think paying for some of that externality would be better.

<comment><USER3> I hate excessively loud bikes as much as anyone; there is a line between 'hearable' and 'earsplitting' that is often missed. Is not some noise, though, a de minimis appropriate compense for the danger associated with choosing a lighter weight, more environmental, and federal HOV-compliant vehicle? If the per person transportation ecologics and economics are favorable for bikes vs. cars shouldn't we look to improve the externalities (safety) around such transportation methods? Even if it comes with some externtalacious discomfort?

(fwiw my current vehicle is approximately the loudest allowable per federal regulations, because I enjoy the sound it makes, not safety per say.)

<comment><USER4> > because I enjoy the sound it makes

I don't. The worst way to start my day is to be woken up by some moron revving their Harley on the road near my home at 6.20am.

GP's point is that everyone is paying the price for the choices that operators of motorbikes make. No one wants to listen to 'loudest allowable per federal regulations' riding past their family home after-hours. That price needs to be factored into the cost of operating a motorbike/truck/other loud transport near population centres.

<comment><USER3> >I don't. The worst way to start my day is to be woken up by some moron revving their Harley on the road near my home at 6.20am.

That might be relevant if those Harley's were anywhere near the legal dB limit.

P.S. the hate I'm getting here for stating that _I follow the law_ , to the letter, on noise regulations is insane. If you/anyone think a straight pipe Harley is close to legal check your facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sure, maybe after we handle air pollution, carbon in the atmosphere, and plastic, then we can talk about noise pollution.

It's so fun to point out new problems, but trying to prioritize everything is basically prioritizing nothing.

<comment><USER6> ah but it just so happens that the cause of most air pollution, carbon in the atmosphere, and noise pollution in cities is the same thing: cars & trucks

<comment><USER7> Ever lived near a train? Horn blasts, diesel fumes, dust & particulate kicked up from the railbed.

Or a bus stop? Air brakes, audible announcements, and in some cities chirping every few seconds to alert the blind to its presence.

<comment><USER6> I live, and am sitting, less than 500 feet from several trains right now. I can hear one rolling on the tracks. I can hear the ding-dong noise they play before they close the doors on another.

It is _noooothing_ compared to the honking of any driver who feels like anything in the universe costing them more than one half of a second deserves an airhorn blast. Its nowhere near as annoying as the beep-beep-beep of trucks backing up. Its much fainter than the blasting ambulance and fire truck sirens necessary to pierce the bubble of car drivers attention. Its also much less than the idling engine noise of the delivery vans.

<comment><USER7> Honking from the (closer!) freeway barely registers. Horn blasts from the level crossing resonate in my chest. When a train zooms by it's at least over quickly. When it lumbers out of the station and the whole sequence is delivered directly to my window, I just have to pause my conversation/TV show for a minute or two.

It was worth the substantial rent discount at the time I lived there, but pretty extreme as noise goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My neighbors put up a 20 foot plus wide American flag. It's absurdly loud. When it storms and gets wet, it's all I can hear inside my house.

While I don't think it's the next public health crisis, it's certainly a crisis for me. And no, there's nothing I can do about it. Good luck getting a city official to take up that battle. I've been told that maybe I'm just more sensitive to noise than others, and that their sensors can't pick up noises over wind.

<comment><USER9> If you want to do something: Find your local color guard and make contact, they're usually pretty good about reaching out and educating people about flag care and conduct. I'm not one to be that kind of patriotic, but I've seen various color guard groups around the country educate car dealerships, restaurants, retail stores, etc. Either proper care was taken from that point forward, or the flag was removed.

<comment><USER8> Oh, interesting idea. Thank you, I'll give that a shot!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The police need to crack down on incredibly loud motorcycles.

<comment><USER11> I'm _not_ totally embedded in the motorcycle lifestyle enough to give you a well written detail into the reasoning but I have been exposed to a lot of riders.

I'll say this. In numerous cases, loud motorcyclists do it for their SAFETY. Most motorists don't pay attention to a small vehicle, especially if it were quiet. Most motorists are listening to music or something else, so the road doesn't have their utmost attention. The LOUDness of their motorcycle jolts the unattended motorists that a tiny vehicle is nearby.

As for the excessively loud, etc, that's above my understanding.

Finally, your biggest defense against loud motorists (in your home) is double drywalled and good insulation in your home. It will become a lot quieter and you'll have energy efficiencies by doing so.

<comment><USER12> >loud motorcyclists do it for their SAFETY.

I love it when someone who deliberately has a loud motorbike insists it has to be loud for safety reasons. I have met a few people who have claimed this. It always appears to be the only thing they do for safety reasons, the rest of their lives being a messy blur of insanely risky life decisions.

<comment><USER11> > It always appears to be the only thing they do for safety reasons, the rest > of their lives being a messy blur of insanely risky life decisions

They don't wear chaps. Nor helmets. Nor anything else for safety. But let's reduce the argument only to your perception of this issue. /s Come on. Let's be more rational than this.

Yes, motorcyclists are risky. Yes they do numerous risky things. But everything we (a more general claim) do is on a gradient. It's on a sliding scale. Let's stop reducing this issue to 'loud noises don't help much. Nor has anyone, that I met claimed this. They are reckless people'.

<comment><USER12> I am not saying that motorcyclists in general are reckless people. I am saying that all the motorcyclists I know who have tried to claim that they have a loud motorbike for safety reasons are at the reckless end of the spectrum, regarding the motorcyclists that I know. And I find this contrast pretty funny. To the extent that I have had to previously explain why I am giggling to someone who looks like they could rip off my head with one hand. After pointing out the bare arms and jeans that they often ride in, they admitted I had a point, said they actually just like loud noises and started giggling too, thankfully.

<comment><USER11> I'm glad that you notice the spectrum of motives/rationale to the loud mufflers.

<comment><USER12> I'm just waiting for electric bikes to take off more to see the Akira prediction of Clowns vs Capsules.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand why electric bikes haven't already taken off. But hopefully the future is good because of us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hate noise pollution. I accidentally picked the worst apartment I can imagine, and I didn't realize it until I moved in: right next to the road that leads to the freeway on-ramp. After about 8pm, everyone wants to get on the highway as fast as possible, which results in tons of noise pollution.

I finally broke down and got the Sony WH1000MX3 headphones, which apparently have the "best" active noise cancellation. They do help, but they aren't perfect. They're also super expensive, which makes them impractical for a lot of people.

The entire problem could be solved with EVs or enforcing noise ordinances, but I feel like it just takes one person to ruin the whole thing.

<comment><USER14> EVs do nothing to tire noise, which is a major part of the total noise output of a car.

<comment><USER15> But they would make a substantial difference for medium sized lorries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I could pass one dictatorial law --- hypothetically ignoring constituents and implementation details, but limited to pretty low-consequence stuff --- I would give serious consideration to pricing car honking at max($5, $5 x # of seconds honking). If you _really_ need to honk, you'll happily pay $5 for the ability. If you don't, please spare us your tantrum.

I live on a semi-busy street in a big east coast city. It's almost amazing how many people honk and how often out of what looks mostly like frustration or spite. At least once a month someone honks for thirty straight seconds, always because they are mad about traffic that nobody can change.

<comment><USER17> Somewhere, I saw the proposal that honking should be required to be as loud inside the car as outside it, which provides a non-monetary disincentive.

<comment><USER18> Now that's a good idea. Just adjust the required loudness level to be the same as max(inside of average car right next to you, open street 10m from you), otherwise the extremely low sound could disorient you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> God I love not living in a dense city. I haven't heard a car horn in days. The air outside smells better than the air inside. Visiting NYC my biggest impression was how much a nightmare it would've been for me to live there. It sounded like a vacuum running all the time. It was all dark because the buildings blocked sunlight. The air made my nose burn. Seeing a tree and a patch of grass on a streetcorner was like an oasis in the middle of a concrete desert.

<comment><USER20> In the suburbs we get the buzz of gas-powered motors all day when we are home.

<comment><USER2> Some places are doing something about that: [https://www.marinij.com/2016/11/11/marin-voice-why- larkspurs...](https://www.marinij.com/2016/11/11/marin-voice-why-larkspurs- proposed-leaf-blower-restrictions-go-too-far/)

[http://claycord.com/2018/12/06/group-looks-to-ban-gas- powere...](http://claycord.com/2018/12/06/group-looks-to-ban-gas-powered-leaf- blowers-in-walnut-creek/)

The trimmers and leaf blowers were the worst part of living in mountain view for me. My apartment had no AC (didn't really need it 99% of the time), so that meant open windows... and almost every day had a different neighbors lawn service blasting noise in the morning. Sometimes waking me up, almost always making it impossible to work from home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Noise in general is a problem, but in particular it seems to me that emergency vehicle sirens have gotten much louder over the last few years. Also, the flashing lights on police cars seem like they're a lot brighter. Am I just imagining this?

<comment><USER22> Not sure about the siren level, but police cars have definitely been leveraging the low wattage bright LED technology to make their cars light up like the worlds brightest red & blue Christmas tree. Seems like they're innovating also on different strobe patterns to see just what is most attention getting. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't counterproductive to make your car so violently visible that nobody can actually look directly at it. Especially for drunks that might actually be drawn towards all those pretty flashin' lights.

</comment></comment><comment> cadence- AC installed between houses that are close to each other are another menace that makes it hard to sleep if your bedroom is on the wrong side of house. It's not even the noise level, as it is the vibration and low frequency hum that often has an annoying phase that makes it difficult to ignore. White noise helps a bit, but that only works for people who are okay with blasting white noise in their bedrooms. Same goes for swimming pool pumps. Most places don't have good laws regarding constant noise levels (as opposed to laws that govern things like loud music at night). Noise pollution is a real problem that affects your health. And most of it could be solved by engineering if the required laws were more strict.

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems like in the last decade, there's been a design trend in fast food restaurant for maximizing the ambient noise. I love Chipotle's food, but I just can't eat inside, it's so ridiculously loud. I hope this trend dies soon.

<comment><USER24> That almost sounds intentional so you leave sooner. This allows the restaurant to hold more people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "It's aural litter — acoustical litter — and, if you could see what you hear, it would look like piles and piles of McDonald's wrappers, just thrown out the window as we go driving down the road."

That's how I feel about noise pollution _inside_ the office.

</comment><comment><USER26> As long as there is open offices there is a easy fix to lower pollution to 20% by doing home-office.

<comment><USER27> I used to think my office was quiet until I got noise cancelling headphones. Now every time I take them off I am hit with a deafening ambiant noise which I think is a combination of the fans in peoples computers and the sound of cars making it through the building walls.

<comment><USER20> White noise is a good way to filter out spectral peaks that are more disturbing.

<comment> frosted-flakes I prefer a pink noise myself.

[https://mynoise.net](https://mynoise.net) is great for this. There are loads of sound generators for different environments, each of which has sliders for each frequency. I sometimes use it when I have trouble falling asleep (I pin the site to my homepage on Android Chrome).

<comment><USER28> Thanks. An interesting one: "Neuromodulator • A sound designed to squash down your tinnitus"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Air pollution is still the next big public-health crisis. 4.2 million people die each year from air pollution [https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/](https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/).

</comment><comment><USER30> I didn't realize it when signing but the apartment I'm staying in through Bungalow is under a flight path.

There is a curfew for flights at night but that only covers departures. Airplanes can still land at any hour.

It's a slow torture. I can't wait to leave San Diego.

<comment><USER31> I did a ton of research when I got my place, about the area and all its quirk. It was fine. I bought it, then 2 years later a nearby airport changed their software which modified some flight routes, and more importantly lowered the altitude planes flew over extremely densely populated areas, making them incredibly noisy. All this happened in the name of saving fuel.

Now I haven't opened the windows in years, especially not at night (else its impossible to sleep), the outdoor deck is unusable except for days where planes don't actually fly over because of wind direction, etc. Starting to plan selling the place partly because of it. Fortunately a lot of people swear until they're blue in the face that this isn't happening (even though its easy to find proof), so resell value isn't affected.

<comment><USER32> I live on Moffett Field and the noise from the 101 is deafening and the occasional noise from a C-130 isn't even noticeable. Freeway noise is far more disruptive than almost airplanes.

<comment><USER33> Hearing that (no pun intended) doesn't give me hope for the new Moffett housing development, which I believe, would be even closer to 101 than Wescoat Village.

[https://mv-voice.com/news/2018/06/01/nasa-picks-partner-for-...](https://mv- voice.com/news/2018/06/01/nasa-picks-partner-for-huge-moffett-housing- development)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Constant sirens from emergency vehicles seem to be about as useful as car alarms.

Except in urban environments the sirens are 24/7, reverberate for blocks, and are extremely hard to localize until the vehicle is right next to you and blaring at 120dB.

It's like someone constantly yelling "hey, there's an emergency somewhere!"

</comment><comment><USER35> The technology is ready - EVs - but the ramp up is taking too long. States and cities need to ban the sale of new non-hybrid ICE vehicles starting now - there are already options at all price points.

<comment><USER36> > there are already options at all price points

Not even close. There are a lot of people who cannot afford EVs. There are a bunch of people who cannot afford a new car at any price. Most of the people you see on the road driving 20-year-old cars are not doing it by choice.

There are also a lot of people who could afford an EV but do not have a place to charge one, because they live in an apartment complex without chargers or need to use street parking. No, charging your car at work is not a good solution because there would not be enough chargers if everyone had to drive EVs.

The burden of banning internal-combustion vehicles would disproportionately fall upon renters and the poor, who are also the people most affected by noise pollution.

<comment><USER35> Its time to buck up and make some sacrifices for the sake of our health and our planet. All of these problems can be overcome with a little bit of effort. Are we that collectively lazy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> First half of the article felt more likely to be a modern risk due to earbuds. Actual ambient noise pollution might be a problem, but I doubt it. I don't see how such studies could adequately control for air pollution. On a related note, this quote from the article didn't make any sense to me:

> 'If you could eliminate all motor-vehicle noise or all motor-vehicle air > pollution—but not both—which would you choose?' As a rule, the majority > chose noise."

<comment><USER30> Noise is the obvious answer if the respondents are in a city with a low AQI number.

It can be hard to breathe in large cities in India and China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Low-frequency rumbling noise is particularly horrible. You can hear it from miles away. It seems almost inescapable in and near cities.

</comment><comment><USER38> Harleys with no muffler. They need to be banned.

</comment><comment><USER39> Earplugs solve this for most locations.

<comment><USER16> For a little while. But earplugs are not comfortable for hours of use, and they can cause tinnitus-type effects if you do that.

<comment><USER40> I've worn earplugs and put a big fan next to my head every night for years, because I'm a very light sleeper. I don't get any kind of irritation from it.

I think the big thing is people don't know how to put earplugs in properly, the entire plug should be in your ear canal. To do it, you need to pull up from the top of your ear when inserting to fully seat it.

<comment><USER41> No, the big things are varying ear canal sizes and shapes, varying earplug sizes and shapes, and side sleepers.

Put an earplug in your ear that seals the ear canal, then press firmly on the outside of your ear canal (on the side of your head, in front of the tragus). Feel that pressure. Now imagine doing that for 8 hours a night.

I have had to sleep with ear plugs because of noise from neighbors. Two results: waking up with painful ear canals during the night, and semi- permanently enlarged ear canals, requiring the use of larger ear plugs to seal, which causes more pain.

If you can comfortably sleep with ear plugs with no adverse effects, you are lucky.

<comment><USER40> The way I put them in, there's no pressure pushing on them through the night since they're so far in. And I'm a side sleeper, too.

<comment><USER41> I think you're one of the lucky ones, then, that the anatomy of your ear canal allows the earplug to seal the passage without the pillow putting pressure on it.

What almost works for me is using two differently sized earplugs and putting the smaller one in the pillow-side ear, because the pillow pushing on the ear canal causes it to seal despite the smaller plug. But when I roll onto my other side several times a night, I'd have to wake up and swap ear plugs. It's not feasible. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I used to live near a train track. When I first moved there it bothered me quite a lot. When I moved out it was more like "what trains"?

<comment><USER14> Somehow it's easier to get used to train noise than automobile noise. I'm not sure why.</comment></comment>


App That Helps Reduce Your Kid's Internet Addiction - <AUTHOR> https://dnslearning.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> related : The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14910125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14910125)</comment>


CEOs, Not the Unemployed, Are America's Real Moral Hazard - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/18/coronavirus-stimulus-checks-unemployment-benefits <comment><USER2> What would be nice is a historical look at the CEO role over time along with the other changes to how companies are run.

For me- I've seen a shift in company mentality from making sure they had money to cover 5 year plans towards a focus on paying out the biggest share dividend they could. This with the shift into JIT production management/outsourcing to reduce costs further all in a drive to show accountancy wise how good they are and pushing out the largest share dividend each year. At least that is how I've seen things shift company wise with the shareholders usurping the customer as priority, with both usurping the workers who used to be one happy family towards a HR production line of payroll numbers.

This then creates a climate in which the perception is that the CEO does all the work and the only one the shareholders would know and as such the rise in top exec pay and stagnation in workers pay has seen a divide between them only grow wider and wider.

But when share dealing systems are more often driven by perception, the rush to keep share dividends high as that is measurable perception is one that holds more gravitas than before and in many aspects for workers has created a race to the bottom.

Is this America's real moral hazard? Not in so much that it is a global moral hazard with some countries more advanced along that direction than others, though I could not name a country in which companies are operated in a way that does not have a share price/share dividend focus over all else, at least any that would stick out large business wise. Smaller companies and businesses still mostly still have that family culture with workers and see's workers as one of the most important assets that business has and can put names to them all.</comment>


Ask HN: How can a back-end engineer find a front-end engineer to collaborate? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I'm a back-end engineer (Ruby, Rails, Node.js).  I have enough skills to get by on the front-end, but my UI/UX skills are just average.
I make use of good tools and open source stuff like Bootstrap and other front-end libraries/frameworks, but I'm afraid my project won't succeed with my mediocre front-end skills.
How can I find (as an engineer, not an idea guy) a front-ender to work on my project with me and split ownership? I have high hopes for this project and ideally could bootstrap and see where it goes. It's a SaaS web app that doesn't have many technical challenges or barriers, in a niche space where this market hasn't been targeted. <comment><USER2> There was/is a 'looking for co-founder?' thread yesterday, but it hasn't taken off yet. Enough upvotes, but too little content. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213803)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, posted over there.</comment></comment>


Who needs to scrape millions of pages, or monitor them? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
For the last year I have been working on a easy to use web scraper called Tales. Tales is written in java. Tales uses http apis to start scraping. It has an html dashboard where you can see in real time things like: memory, cpu, pages per second scraped, errors, server health, and other dev-friendly goodies.
Tales gives you an out of the box way of scraping html and put them into s3 (i.e ...:8080/start?process=tales.scrapers.LoopScraper -template tales.templates.DynamicDataDownloader -threads 2 -namespace com_twitter -baseURL twitter.com), but you can also extend it for custom scraping logics. An example of custom scraping could be to scrape title, ratings, images, blobs, and store it into mysql using simple tales java apis.
Tales is made of interesting services. Among them we can find:
- GitSync: maintains code in the server up to date, all you need is to push from your local computer. - DirListener: among other important things it compiles the services every time it sees a change. - ServerMonitor: keeps track of the server health. - S3DBBackup, S3DBRestore: backups and restores databases -- You may ran out of space, or want to move.
Tales can run as many threads as you like, it uses little memory and cpu, and run for days. It can run in many servers at the same time, with all the databases located in 1 place, or distributed across the servers, all manageable via java apis or the config file.
Tales can also failover to another server when blocked. The failover logic uses a java interface, with it you can write custom ip pooling logics.
Tales had scraped 10s of millions of pages across many domains.
* Source https://github.com/calufa/tales-core * Documentation is old, I will update it soon.
I am currently working with big data -- solr, OpenNLP, all that sugar -- and I needed data from custom sources and I didn't want to run 10 shells to get that done.
email@example.com
linkedin.com/in/calufa <comment><USER2> Cool !! Is it robots.txt compliant? If not, it might be a good idea to make this available as an option/parameter.

For 'quick and dirty' tasks, wget -r can come in handy too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently it doesn't look at the robots.txt file. I had taken note of this, and will be added in future releases. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> very cool, is it doing a depth first blind crawl of any domain you throw at it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It will basically go through all the links it finds, that can be millions of links. You can also tell it to ignore certain links using regular expressions or via tales java apis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is a sample code of a 1 depth scrape:

[https://github.com/calufa/tales- templates/blob/master/core/s...](https://github.com/calufa/tales- templates/blob/master/core/src/sample/FirstDepthTemplate.java)

This is the api call to start the scraper on twitter:

[http://localhost:8080/start?process=tales.scrapers.LoopScrap...](http://localhost:8080/start?process=tales.scrapers.LoopScraper) -template tales.templates.FirstDepthTemplate -threads 2 -namespace com_twitter -baseURL twitter.com</comment></comment></comment>


Node Wrapper and CLI for EasyPost - <AUTHOR> http://blog.geteasypost.com/post/47203812557/nodewrapperforeasypost

<comment><USER2> and if you want a laugh while you're on the command line, try `$ npm install -g giggity` and then `$ giggity` <https://github.com/niftylettuce/giggity>

<comment><USER3> :-( broken on windows.

<comment><USER2> ping me firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First I've heard of EasyPost, kickass idea. Hope it goes well guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Facebook acquires Storylane, a story-telling platform - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/03/08/facebook-acquires-storylane/

<comment><USER2> Storylane is joining forces with Facebook! Read about it more in our CEO's story

The link from here is a little disappointing, this would have been a perfect opportunity to showcase the technology instead of just a blog post.</comment>


Is "Undesigned" the Next Great Web Trend? Fat Chance - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662630/is-undesigned-the-next-great-web-trend-fat-chance

<comment><USER2> A hell of a lot of interviews in there---Some smart people weighing in. Though maybe Dadich, father of the Wired iPad app, is the OPPOSITE of design that gets out of the way of the reading experience? Check out these posts for more:

[http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/wired-on-ipad-just- li...](http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/wired-on-ipad-just-like-a-paper- tiger/)

<http://www.subtraction.com/2010/10/27/my-ipad-magazine-stand>

</comment><comment><USER3> "What actually repulses us is distraction, not design." True words.

</comment><comment><USER4> How is that people keep making the mistake of suggesting that design -- instead of bad design -- is obsolete?

<comment><USER5> Same reason that designers mistakenly think that adding a bunch of whizzy shit to text is useful.

Design has its place. That place is not "everywhere."</comment></comment>


Netflix may lose $1.8M to $3.6M in revenue per day over outage - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9676

<comment><USER2> I don't think netflix will lose too many customers over this. It was really cool to get an e-mail saying sorry we haven't shipped your disk we will credit you before I even realized something was wrong. Normal companies just act like nothing is happening and you have to call them to get a credit.</comment>


SQLite with a Fine-Toothed Comb - <AUTHOR> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1292 <comment><USER2> I'm somewhat surprised by D. Hipp's response. I understand that the UB in SQLite is "OK" since it is _very_ well tested, but I figured he would still have a strong opinion about avoiding almost all UB.

Regehr is right though, I'm working on porting SQLite to iOS (and a CMake build system along the way) for as part of testing a custom compiler for correctness. I already got the SQLite TCL test suite running on a jailbroken device and the number of failures was less than 20, out of many tens of thousands of tests. That is definitely tractable!!

Edit: Mr. Hipp is a doctor, not a professor. Thank you, FrankBooth.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what in the article gave you the impression that Richard Hipp doesn't have a strong, positive opinion about fixing undefined behavior in SQLite. He has patiently fixed all the issues that were straightforward to fix. That's commendable.

Some of the design choices in SQLite go back to the early 2000, and looked like good ideas at the time. Some of the problems detected by tis-interpreter had no sanitizer to detect them until the latter appeared. That's a long time to use seemingly okay, in-practice-harmless idioms such as 1-indexed arrays everywhere in a large software project. And there is the question of how many real bugs would be introduced by trying too hard to fix these (though hopefully the excellent test suite would prevent that).

<comment><USER4> You may not have seen Richard's comment that was added at the bottom of the the blog post just before 'jevinskie' commented. It includes this paragraph:

      Prof. Regehr did not find problems with SQLite. He found
      constructs in the SQLite source code which under a strict
      reading of the C standards have "undefined behaviour",
      which means that the compiler can generate whatever machine
      code it wants without it being called a compiler bug.
      That's an important finding. But as it happens, no modern
      compilers that we know of actually interpret any of the
      SQLite source code in an unexpected or harmful way. We know
      this, because we have tested the SQLite machine code –
      every single instruction – using many different compilers,
      on many different CPU architectures and operating systems
      and with many different compile-time options. So there is
      nothing wrong with the sqlite3.so or sqlite3.dylib or
      winsqlite3.dll library that is happily running on your
      computer. Those files contain no source code, and hence no
      UB.

I'm not sure yet if this is a appropriately healthy or inappropriately fatalistic attitude. I like that it puts the emphasis on testing the binary rather than focussing on how any particular compiler version interprets the source, but I don't know if even SQLite has dense enough tests to justify confidence in this approach. It also makes me wonder if there should be greater emphasis on binary distribution.

<comment><USER3> On the density of SQLite's tests, Hwaci owns a test suite with MC/DC coverage[1][2], that Richard kindly loaned to John for this experiment. MC/DC coverage is used as a criterion for safety-critical software testing. Before hearing about SQLite, I had never seen anyone commit to MC/DC coverage without being forced to by a safety standard.

This test suite is how John found so much stuff, and that's also how one can trust that the binaries produced by compilers tested by Richard Hipp work correctly even if there is some undefined behavior in the source code.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_condition/decision_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_condition/decision_coverage)

[2] [https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html#mcdc](https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html#mcdc)

<comment><USER4> I'm amazed by the quality of their tests, but still wonder if it's enough. The question I had going in was whether their test coverage looked all the possible branches in the source (ie, what the programmer intended) or all the branches in the binary (ie, post compiler "optimizations").

Looking at your second link, it ends up being the less desired second option, but since they are using -fprofile-arcs it may be the added profiling code defeats the unwanted optimizations. But still, a potential blind spot occurs when both the production and instrumented code have the same omissions.

So while their level of testing is truly heroic, since the effect of UB optimization can be to omit branches that the compiler reasons can never happen, it seems like there still may be cases where source level coverage does not match up with binary coverage. Maybe they have some external way of noticing that this is happening?

Edit: Just saw that there are some new comments from both John and Richard at the bottom of the blog post.

<comment><USER5> If some necessary code is optimized away, this can surely translate to the code missing some requirement or failing, which can be covered by a regression test case.

Anyway, it sounds like the testing is better than what is applied to the compilers they are using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> UB = undefined behaviour for anyone else who didn't get the unspecified acronym at first glance.

<comment><USER7> It is defined at first use :

Here I try to depict the various categories of undefined behaviors (UBs)

<comment><USER6> Huh, I didn't see that when I first read the article. Maybe it was added or maybe I just missed it.

<comment><USER8> He amended the article after getting comments like yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We need to get John Regehr on the C standard committee!</comment>


HTML5 or Flash Video Players? - <AUTHOR> http://devstand.com/design/flash-vs-html5-video-players/ The video sharing industry is growing rapidly so I guess you already thought about creating your new website on this area. One big question though...what kind of video player will you use?
A Flash one or a HTML5 one? While Flash is fancy and elegant, it cannot compete with HTML5 which offers a light-weight interface which brings performance, speed and it works perfect with any kind of modern device.
Check out more and let us know which one fits your needs... <comment><USER2> just a "list" with affiliates links people and no real information</comment>


My travels: Judith Schalansky on remote islands (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2011/apr/16/judith-schalansky-atlas-remote-islands <comment><USER2> As an owner of Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands (I actually have the "pocket atlas" version), I have to say it's a really beautiful little book with poetic and well-written stories for each entry. I'd definitely recommend it for anyone who enjoys Atlas Obscura-type stories of strange tales from across the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Two bridges chained it to the mainland ... it didn't feel like a proper island."

I'm glad it's not just me that thinks this way - the bridge to Skye did remove a bit of romance for me. Mind you the bridge is infinitely more convenient, faster, cheaper..... I've used the wee ferry from Glenelg a few times since the bridge opened to get that feeling back!

[http://skyeferry.co.uk/](http://skyeferry.co.uk/)

<comment><USER4> Some places, like Hong Kong, don't have bridges only tunnels ... which possibly makes a significant difference in subconscious perception!

<comment><USER3> If we are talking about connections between islands and the "mainland" then that possibly also applies to the island of Great Britain ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can take a ferry to North Manitou island in northern Michigan. It's a great weekend adventure.</comment>


Alien ship may be among us, Harvard astronomer insists - <AUTHOR> https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/science/ct-harvard-astronomer-aliens-20190204-story.html <comment><USER2> naive question: any way to point the hubble at this thing for a real good look?</comment>


A Mansion Filled with Hidden Worlds: When the Internet Was Young - <AUTHOR> https://undark.org/article/wilo-evans-broad-band/ <comment><USER2> I used to log in to LambdaMOO about once a year just to keep my account active. But it started feeling not just like a museum, but a mausoleum, and I let my account lapse.

Many of the virtual environment ideas from LambdaMOO exist now in modern games. But one big idea was mostly lost, the idea that players of the game could also program the game. Not just decorate their own house but write code to give the objects in that house functionality. Roblox has this in it, as does Minecraft in a limited way, but mostly it is a lost idea.

<comment><USER3> A big part of Secondlife is object and scripting development.

<comment><USER4> I've only heard of Second Life, not tried it, so can I ask: is that scripting capability "online"? I.e. is this more like a multiuser Smalltalk environment (or an SQL server with stored procedures), where the IDE and the REPL and the compiler are all "within" the shared space; or is the toolchain offline, and you just push compiled modules to the server?

LambdaMOO was the former: you were using existing objects to code new objects, by sending the existing objects messages on a live server. (A bit like writing bash scripts on a multitenant Unix server where everyone can drop things into /usr/local/bin, really.)

I feel like there's a wide-open space in the market right now for a game like Minecraft or Mario Maker where everything is built out of "blocks" with behaviours—but where these block-type behaviours are scripted within the envrionment itself, so you can create and share new "block types" without the need for any meta-VR commands. Like a Steam Workshop service, but one that is intended for players, rather than for game developers. A game with an scientific invention economy.

<comment> amiga-workbench The Second Life world is made from prims (primitive shapes), these prims can be textured, adjusted and grouped together to build objects, buildings, pretty much anything.

Each prim can have event driven, procedural scripts attached to them. There is basic RPC functionality available in LSL and objects can communicate with each other via chat channels, email (if I remember rightly every prim has a UUID and email address) or via a XML HTTP request.

Prims can be programatically moved or altered, there is a system for drawing particles, rendering dynamic textures on surfaces and much later I believe surfaces became capable of rendering web documents on them.

There is scope for a ridiculous amount of stuff. One of my favourite little projects was the Stargates you found on the grid, they all have unique addresses and work accurately just like in the show, they're pretty neat for getting around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I was young I played a game like this called Modus Operandi by Simutronics and it was some of the most fun I'd ever had. Apparently there is a resurgence[1] of this type of gaming and a community behind it. I think there is still room for MUDs in the age of hyper-realistic, COD-style games. It just requires a different set of user experiences, much like how books are still engaging in spite of TV and movies.

[1][https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/comments/4d2qid/anyone_remember...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/comments/4d2qid/anyone_remember_simutronics_modus_operandi_its/)

<comment><USER6> I played that too, back when it was on AOL! But my favorite was another Simutronics game, Gemstone III (which later became Gemstone IV). To this day, it was the most interesting online community I've ever been a part of, in part because the majority of the 2,000-odd people who played it at any given time were legitimately trying to be in character, and in part because the experience of an emergent virtual world was still so new back in 95/96\. I wrote an essay about it here, if anyone is interested:

[http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/10/dont-cry-for-me- elanth...](http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/10/dont-cry-for-me-elanthia-an- archaeology-of-gemstone-iii)

<comment><USER7> Gemstone III was my after school haven for the latter half of the 90s. I'd get off of the school bus and rush to log in. I would curse family members when they had to use the phone and I had to log off. I taught myself to touch type to keep up with what was going on. I took hours to roll new characters, and leveling up in that game was the single biggest video game high I've ever experienced (Dark Souls boss victories coming in second). I remember so much, so vividly: the virtual selflessness of healers taking on my wounds, fighting rats in the sewers, taking on jobs in the city to earn money, memorizing strings of map directions to move between hunting grounds, running to the safety of guards around city gates, and especially, especially, the friendliness of the people.

<comment><USER8> What an amazing game. I played for almost a decade as Ascious Alturas and Lyleris Bowstorm. I still remember shooting a friend who was statistically inclined hundreds of times to figure out the damage factors for bows when they were finally introduced. There has never been a game since with such an amazingly interesting player-base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Man, so many memories. I was involved in a MUD called Dragonstone and had so much freaking fun, when I first entered college I had to stop cold turkey because every time I tried to announce that I had to quit to get my homework done, saying goodbye to treasured online associates made me so sad I couldn't follow through on leaving.

I also started one of my own, which gave me my first brush with people doxxing me (not as serious back then - I was more worried that one of them would figure out how to hack my computer - I was not a terribly sophisticated user of the internet back then - probably still am not today. XD)

I learned a bit about algorithms from our head coder, and we put our heads together to make an herbalism system that he should still be quite proud of, I think. Listing each room as a terrain type, a list of herbs that could grow in that terrain, and a random chance that the herbs would grow in any given room.

Man, what a strange time and exciting time that was! :)

</comment><comment><USER10> If you're interested in more about LambdaMOO, Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life is a good read: [https://www.amazon.com/My-Tiny-Life-Passion- Virtual/dp/08050...](https://www.amazon.com/My-Tiny-Life-Passion- Virtual/dp/0805036261)

<comment><USER11> PDF version of "My Tiny Life" is available for zero dollars on lulu dot com: [http://www.lulu.com/shop/julian-dibbell/my-tiny-life- crime-a...](http://www.lulu.com/shop/julian-dibbell/my-tiny-life-crime-and- passion-in-a-virtual-world/ebook/product-17492539.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I spent many many hours on a MUD called Magrathea back in middle school. I pretty much picked it off a list of MUDs because I was a fan of Hitchhiker's Guide. I loved it and was pretty sad when it went offline. I poked around later and realized a lot of Magrathea was pretty stock ROM mud code, although there were some pretty neat custom areas and a cyborg class that I really enjoyed. I actually got in contact with one of the original developers and got the game database (minus users, of course), but the Internet just doesn't need another Diku MUD, especially one whose userbase dissipated almost 20 years ago.

Lambda is interesting but poorly documented in a lot of places. I think bit rot and time means that a lot of the knowledge on how to actually code / use Lambda has gone away. I spent some time circa 2009 playing and hacking in Lambda, built a few things, but the on-line coding system is extremely frustrating. HellMOO built off LambdaCore and is the only truly successful Lambda-based MOO that I know of, excepting of course LambdaMOO itself.

</comment><comment><USER13> What I've always enjoyed is that in MUD's content is a first class citizen. Much of the effort that would be put into graphical assets was instead put into story, mechanics and balance. As a result, some MUD's have fantastically complex political and economic systems.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd recommend to anyone not familiar with the genre, to grab a modern client (Mudlet¹ is cross platform and actively in development) and give it a go.

Especially those who vaguely miss _the spirit of the old internet_ might (re)discover a lot of it in these often tight knit, yet welcoming, communities.

Tip: Stay away from strongly RP focused communities until you're not preoccupied with just thinking about navigation and the various systems anymore. Although, a lot of what makes MUDs tick should resonate strongly with anyone who wrote a program before, so it shouldn't take long to adapt.

¹[https://www.mudlet.org/](https://www.mudlet.org/)

<comment><USER15> > these often tight knit, yet welcoming, communities.

Are they really welcoming? Over the last few years I have occasionally revisited some 1990s-era communities (Usenet groups, forums on a dedicated website, mailing lists...) in search of a sense of tight-knit connectedness lost with modern huge networks like Facebook or Reddit. Yet I almost always found that those 1990s communities that had survived, had eroded down to a handful of posters who were mostly angry and cantankerous, or outright mentally ill. Thus, it was hard for any newcomer to feel comfortable among them. So, I am now very wary about going back to any kind of old-school community, and it would take a lot of evidence to convince me that it was worthwhile to even try.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, some are bogged down in politics and dominated by a few Methuselah with ego problems, but I've played plenty and those are in the minority and stick out like sore thumbs. Keep away from MUDs that take themselves too serious and you're good. Or look out for freshly established ones. Aardwolf would be one example with a very friendly population. Gamewise it's a hodgepodge of creative writing and doesn't follow any strong guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was a big player of MUDs back in the 90s. I probably spent way too many hours staring at green text (when I should have been studying), but I wouldn't trade those hours for anything. Some of my best computing memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met in the games. Some were even at my wedding!

Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did.

The connected player base is just a fraction of what it once was. Which always struck me as odd, seeing as how there are massively more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, it always struck me as there should be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'll go walking around the old worlds, remembering the epic battles involving dozens of players and hundreds of NPCs. These days, most spaces are almost completely abandoned. If you've ever seen the music video for Sting's song Fields of Gold [0], it captures the mood of walking around the old rooms perfectly. It seems like just yesterday we were all having a grand time RPing, but everyone's gone now.

Towards the end of 2005, one of the MUDs I had played on quite a bit from the mid 90s on decided it was time to call it a game. I had been with the game through multiple server moves over the years, but the player base just wasn't there anymore.

So on the last night, a handful of us gathered one last time. I thought it was going to be a bit like a funeral, but it ended up being a whole lot of fun. We spent hours that night reminiscing about old plots, talking about old characters, remembering all the good times we had spent together, and swapping contact information. Some of us had been playing together for years; it almost felt like we were saying goodbye to a dear friend in the best way we knew how.

Most of us were there until the final minutes. We all raised our [virtual] glasses in a toast. Then, the lights went out, the server shut down and the game was no more. In retrospect, it reminded me of the final minutes of Babylon 5 [1].

I stopped playing a lot in the late 90s when I left for college. I would still connect occasionally, but I just didn't have the time to devote to it like I did when I was a teenager. In that time, Warcraft and Second Life sucked most of the people I played with away, and I could just never get into either. They're kind of overload for me, and, frankly, just not very interesting. For some reason, my brain just works best with the simple text that MUDs provided.

Games like these are by definition social constructs. They take on a life of their own. And like all things, the end will eventually come. But rather than mourn its passing, I prefer to remember all the good times and treasure all the friendships that I made (many of whom I still keep up with to this day). The game may be gone, but the memories will always be with us.

Walking around the old worlds is sad, true. Nostalgic. But also some happiness. I'm glad I got to be part of that era, and glad for the friendships I made.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVq0IAzh1A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVq0IAzh1A)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znNciln7qwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znNciln7qwY)

</comment><comment><USER17> I want to say that a lot of these kind of gems still hide in the corners of the internet. There are both awesome and horrible things going on in VR chat, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER18> I used to play Ishar MUD back in the 90s. I think it still exists, run on a flash player.

</comment><comment><USER19> Holy shit, I can't believe I just read a story about LambdaMoo that didn't mention the Mr. Bungle incident. Is that legal?

[http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-r%61pe-in- cyberspace...](http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-r%61pe-in-cyberspace/) \- content warning: rape, or rape-like things, it's complicated

——

MU*s were pretty important to me. I fell into them, I left them, I came back, I met the person who's now my significant other and creative partner on a high-concept SF furry muck he ran. Some of my circles still hang out on them; I find I just can't go back. I only have so much creative energy and I'd rather spend it on comics than on late-night role playing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Felt the same the night I tried tor web. Nothing interesting came out of it, but the surprise factor is so strong.</comment>


USB armory: an open-source hardware design, flash-drive sized computer - <AUTHOR> https://inversepath.com/usbarmory.html <comment><USER2> Better resources:

\- Landing page [https://inversepath.com/usbarmory.html](https://inversepath.com/usbarmory.html)

\- Wiki [https://github.com/f-secure- foundry/usbarmory/wiki](https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/usbarmory/wiki)

\- MkII introduction on there [https://github.com/f-secure- foundry/usbarmory/wiki/Mk-II-Int...](https://github.com/f-secure- foundry/usbarmory/wiki/Mk-II-Introduction)

<comment><USER3> i will NEVER understand why so called "news articles" don't put a link to the product that they are reviewing. Thank you for the links!

<comment><USER4> i PERFECTLY understand why so called "news articles" don't put a link to the product that they are reviewing.

They don't want users to click links and go away.

<comment><USER3> target="_blank"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cost is around $150 for those who don't want to click around to find it.

Hardware specs:

SoC: NXP i.MX6ULZ ARM® Cortex™-A7 900 MHz

RAM: 512 MB DDR3

Storage: internal 16 GB eMMC + external microSD

Bluetooth module: u-blox ANNA-B112 BLE

USB-C ports: DRP (Dual Role Power) receptacle + UFP (Upstream Facing Port) plug, USB 2.0 only (no video support)

LEDs: two

Slide switch: for boot mode selection between eMMC and microSD

External security elements: Microchip ATECC608A + NXP A71CH

Physical size: 66 mm x 19 mm x 8 mm (without enclosure, including USB-C connector)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. That's a $2 SoC, part of NXP's "Ultra Low Cost" line. The whole BOM cost is probably around $10-15, so hopefully F-Secure can sell enough of these to bring consumer cost down.

I can see a lot of use for these guys, but it's hard to justify when as Pi Zero outspecs it for 5% of the cost. I'd pick it up just to hack around if it was closer to the $50 range.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if it's one of the chips that has a bootloader vulnerability. All of the trustzone stuff was completely broken on their original, and nobody ever implemented working code for it anyway.

The BOM cost is probably pretty high because of the BGA package, the original was like a 8 layer board or something absurd.

Those processors, as you pointed out, are comically slow even compared with the raspberry pi.

<comment><USER8> We took part of in the original HAB disclosure process for the NXP i.MX series and we carry on testing these parts.

Please see [https://github.com/f-secure- foundry/advisories](https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/advisories)

Of course all P/Ns used for the Mk II have a patched boot ROM, please see [https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/usbarmory/wiki/Secure- bo...](https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/usbarmory/wiki/Secure-boot-\(Mk- II\)#security-information).

The original Mk I was 6 layers in the end, the Mk II is also 6 layers.

And yes the BOM cost is considerable due to its specifications.

The i.MX SoC core we use is comparable to a 1st gen Raspberry PI in speed, but of course slower than newer multi-core ones.

However security and form factor, rather than pure speed, is our goal. For the intent and purposes of the board performance is more than adequate.

Some benchmarks here: [https://github.com/f-secure- foundry/usbarmory/wiki/Benchmark...](https://github.com/f-secure- foundry/usbarmory/wiki/Benchmarks-\(Mk-II\))

<comment><USER7> I have deep respect for you disclosing issues in a processor you're using in your own product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Bash Bunny from Hak5 seems similar for $50 less [1]. It is USB A instead of Type C with only 8 GB of storage but does feature a quad core A7 [2].

[1] [https://shop.hak5.org/products/bash- bunny](https://shop.hak5.org/products/bash-bunny)

[2] [https://forums.hak5.org/topic/40208-bash-bunny- specs/](https://forums.hak5.org/topic/40208-bash-bunny-specs/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The 36c3 talk about this device and TamaGo:

\- [https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2019/Fahrplan/events...](https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2019/Fahrplan/events/10597.html)

\- [https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10597-tamago_- _bare_metal_go_fra...](https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10597-tamago_- _bare_metal_go_framework_for_arm_socs)

</comment><comment> 5- Related devices, where _related_ mostly means "a computer that plugs into a USB port", roughly in recency order:

\- Serpente, $15 Cortex-M0+ [https://www.tindie.com/products/arturo182/serpente-a-tiny- ci...](https://www.tindie.com/products/arturo182/serpente-a-tiny- circuitpython-prototyping-board/)

\- Somu, $35 Cortex-M4 [https://www.crowdsupply.com/solokeys/somu](https://www.crowdsupply.com/solokeys/somu)

\- Fomu, $50 ICE40UP5K [https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio- kosagi/fomu](https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu)

\- GL.iNet GL-USB150, $30 MIPS 24K [https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl- usb150/](https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-usb150/)

\- Bash Bunny, $100 Cortex-A7 [https://shop.hak5.org/products/bash- bunny](https://shop.hak5.org/products/bash-bunny)

\- Espruino Pico, $25 Cortex-M4 [https://www.espruino.com/Pico](https://www.espruino.com/Pico)

\- IceStick, $25 ICE40HX1K [https://www.latticesemi.com/icestick](https://www.latticesemi.com/icestick)

</comment><comment><USER11> The idea is nice, it will have to be seen how the actual product will result in practical use, at first sight, it seems like (mechanically) very "flimsy", the device is intended to be supported by its USB-C connector (and that bar the possibility of accidentally breaking it[1] should be fine) but the moment you use the female connector (which is at the other end of the male one) any weight, be it the connected device or the cable to connect it will create a relatively powerful lever on the male USB-C connector.

The only "safe" way to use it seems to me having it on a stable surface and connect also the USB-C male through a cable.

[1] disclaimer, I am not saying that it will happen to you, but I had several USB sticks and/or USB receptacles (the much sturdier type A) broken and/or bent and or however ruined by clumsy colleagues or cleaning ladies and even pets.

<comment><USER8> We found no mechanical issue with the board.

While developing TamaGo I have plugged/unplugged it about 200 times a day for months ;).

<comment><USER11> My note/doubt wasn't about inserting/plugging/unplugging it (I am pretty sure that is fine or at least as fine as any other USB-C device), it is about leaving it plugged (and sticking out without support) to a PC or some other device (thus exposed to accidental hits).

And if at the end of it there is another little device plugged (or a cable) in the female connector, little by little the weight might losen the receptacle of the PC or however put too much traction on the connector soldering or even (I have seen it happening with some devices) slightly bend the board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Super secure, but secure against which kinds of attacks?

Is it secure against key extraction from somebody with physical access to the hardware?

<comment><USER8> The Secure Boot feature ([https://github.com/f-secure- foundry/usbarmory/wiki/Secure-bo...](https://github.com/f-secure- foundry/usbarmory/wiki/Secure-boot-\(Mk-II\))) in concert with full disk encryption prevent anyone from extracting keys.

When used in combination with user supplied passphrases this leaves little chance for physical attacks.

The two external security elements have active protection against glitching and side channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a bricked mk1, it was a convenient place to keep private keys while it worked but unfortunately it didn't last very long before it quit booting.

</comment><comment><USER14> ARM SecureZone is an odd choice on a platform that's aiming to be highly trusted. It's got a very weak security model compared to isolated TPMs (like the two that they have on-board as well). The boot-chaining on this looks like it's entirely reliant on the TrustZone separation, not on either of the two on-board TPMs, nu?

</comment><comment><USER15> Firt thing that comes to my mind will it be dpa resilient?

<comment><USER6> NXP holds patents for SPA and DPA countermeasures[0], and this board's security IC, the NXP A71CH[1] does in fact have this.

[0]:[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20081104005569/en/Cry...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20081104005569/en/Cryptography- Research-Licenses-Differential-Power-Analysis-Countermeasures)

[1]:[https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/A71CH- SDS.pdf](https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/A71CH-SDS.pdf)</comment></comment>


Changing branch alignment causes swings in performance - <AUTHOR> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/86742 <comment><USER2> A fuller description of the post-decode uop cache (with pictures!) is here: [http://www.realworldtech.com/haswell- cpu/2](http://www.realworldtech.com/haswell-cpu/2).

Note that there are two paths for instructions: one, from the L1 icache through the traditional decoders into the instruction queue, and another a post-decode cache directly into the instruction queue. There are numerous advantages to the cache, such as power saved by idling the decode logic, as well as bypassing the 16-byte fetch restriction (which has been a feature of the architecture since the Pentium Pro days).

The gist of the surprising behavior is that the processor cannot execute out of the uop cache if a given 32-byte (naturally aligned) section of code decodes to more than 3 lines of 6 uops each (with the catch being that a branch ends any given line). In that case it falls back to the traditional instruction fetch/decode. Depending on the alignment of branches, you may or may not run into this limitation on an otherwise identical sequence of instructions.

</comment><comment><USER3> This caused me a lot of grief back when I was working on Protobufs and doing lots of microbenchmarking. I'd often make a change and find it affected the performance of test cases that didn't even execute the changed code, sometimes by double-digit percentages.

Another problem that can cause a lot of noise between two executions of the same executable is positioning of _data_. For instance, two objects on the heap can alias in the TLB cache. If you run your microbenchmark in a loop reusing the same data structure over and over (as my benchmarks tended to do), then there can be a huge difference in performance depending where those structures landed in the heap. I ended up fixing this one by allocating 100 different copies of the structure and cycling through them.

Ultimately, though, I came to the conclusion that microbenchmarks have almost nothing to do with real-world performance, and I was just wasting my time all along. :/

</comment><comment><USER4> I would be wary of microbenchmarks like this, especially when the faster sequence is bigger - keeping as much in cache as possible is more important for newer processors, and fetching NOPs wastes bandwidth without doing any useful work. A faster sequence of code won't be anymore if, upon exiting it, something _else_ has to stall due to a cache miss. Pushing the function to the next alignment boundary might move the one _after_ it as well, causing a cascade effect. If you can rearrange the code to spread out the jumps _without_ making it bigger, that would be the best way to go.

</comment><comment><USER5> If anybody else is having trouble accessing the presentation linked as an attachment: the download from the original LLVM bug at [https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=5615](https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=5615) appears to be okay.

</comment><comment><USER6> Instruction alignment is very important for performance. I remember a similar slow down when working on a VM for Itanium. The architecture manuals for processors usually describe this in detail.

<comment><USER4> The Itanium was a somewhat special case. It was very difficult to optimise for, which is why it performed so poorly in practice. In general x86 is far less sensitive to alignment than other architectures, and has been becoming more so with each new generation.

<comment><USER7> by "becoming more so" so do you mean "becoming less so"?

<comment><USER4> I see that doubled-modifier could be a bit confusing: "more less sensitive"; I meant that newer processors are becoming less sensitive to alignment.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


6174 - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6174_(number)

<comment><USER2> i remember writing a qbasic program, in school, to count the number of steps required for a 4-digit number to reach 6174.</comment>


Ask HN: Larry Page livestream? - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/7/7/15938486/uber-larry-page-deposition-alphabet-waymo-lawsuit
Will it likely be possible to watch a live stream of this?
Or how would I attend in person? <comment><USER2> Depositions are not public hearings, but are often done in private.

<comment><AUTHOR> ah thanks</comment></comment>


If you were going to teach programming to your own child, how would you do it?  - <AUTHOR>

More specifically, what language or tools would you use? <comment><USER2> Might be worth checking this out, I asked a similar question a few hours ago and it hit the front page:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1663784>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow! Looks like some great info. Thanks.</comment>


20 percent time - <AUTHOR> http://martinbuberl.com/blog/20-percent-time/ <comment><USER2> This sounds like people saying that all academic research should be product- oriented. If you had a project with defined goals and clear benefit to the company you'd get it on the schedule and call it work. 20% time is for the other stuff, where you don't know where its going or if it'll be worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should have at least a rough sense of direction. A defined goal and clear benefits are definitely not necessary and I believe I state that clearly ("expect that most ideas will fail," "nobody knows what types of projects eventually benefit your company").</comment></comment>